


The King of Hearts

by FrivolousSuits



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magicians, First Meetings, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:07:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24565882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrivolousSuits/pseuds/FrivolousSuits
Summary: “I know what’ll make you feel better,” the bartender chirps while pouring the scotch. “Wanna see a little magic trick?”Harvey– professional magician, world-renowned "King of Cards"– can only stare.
Relationships: Mike Ross/Harvey Specter
Comments: 8
Kudos: 163





	The King of Hearts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TooSel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TooSel/gifts).



_You have to believe we are magic  
Nothing can stand in our way_

Though normally he loves a good throwback, Harvey tunes out the music and collapses on the barstool. There’s a pleasant crowd mingling on one side of the hotel bar, and so he’s claimed the seat at the other end, as far away as he can get.

Donna’s walked out on him again, shouting something about “basic human dignity.” Harvey might’ve recovered, even though she gave him a grand two hours’ notice before showtime, if she hadn’t abandoned him for _Louis Litt_. She abandoned _Harvey Specter_ for a comedy magician who can’t land a joke, a fixture of the corporate conference circuit, best-known for pulling prune smoothies out of cats.

“Scotch on the rocks, and make it fast.”

The bartender– a blond twenty-something, with a grey apron and sparkling blue eyes– flashes him a smile that Harvey would ordinarily classify as adorable. “Tough day?”

Harvey never recovered from the insult of being left for _Louis Litt,_ and so he bluffed his way through tonight’s double act without his assistant and made one mistake after another. He nearly sawed off his own fingers. He nearly set an audience member’s ID _on fire_ without swapping it for the fake. He’ll adjust to the solo life again, he always does what he has to, but the transition is far from elegant.

Harvey settles for a one-word answer: “Apocalyptic.”

He doesn’t remember why he got into this business in the first place.

“I know what’ll make you feel better,” the bartender chirps while pouring the scotch. “Wanna see a little magic trick?”

At first, Harvey can only stare.

Ordinarily, he’d let the kid down easy, just chuckle and say “no thanks.” But it’s been the worst goddamn day since he smashed his shoulder in one of Jessica’s escape acts, and this bartender won’t take a hint and let up on the friendliness. He’s put himself right in the crosshairs. 

Harvey takes a long look at that Pollyanna smile and decides to crush it.

He dons a suave grin, the one he’s perfected onstage; it misdirects most ladies and more than a few men. “Absolutely.”

The bartender pulls out a deck of cards from his apron pocket, and it takes three decades of poker experience for Harvey to not burst out laughing.

He asks Harvey to pick a card, memorize it, and then tuck it back into the deck. Then there’s some shuffling– a couple riffles, a few other frills that he executes with passable flair. Harvey’d be entertained if he believed any of it for a second.

“Ta-da!” The bartender fans out the cards and picks one from the middle. “Is this your card?”

He flashes Harvey the three of clubs with an expectant smile. Harvey grunts his agreement and then shifts all his attention to his drink.

“. . . This is the part where you ask me how Hogwarts was.”

“And I might have been amused,” Harvey drawls without glancing up, “if I didn’t know that deck was marked to hell and back.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the bartender gawping at him, and Harvey feels an uncharacteristic pang of regret. Still he waits for the bartender to back down and admit surrender. 

Defiantly, he thrusts the deck of cards towards Harvey.

“Really?” Harvey challenges. “You sure about this?”

The bartender moves it a little closer. With a sigh, Harvey takes it.

A first pass through doesn’t reveal any marks, none of the gauche etching that Louis depends on for dear life, but in the bar’s low light that means nothing. Harvey shrugs.

“You find anything?”

“Not in a ten-second inspection,” Harvey admits, passing the deck back. “Doesn’t mean there’s nothing to find.”

“Well,” comes the breezy retort, “too bad you don’t have a gold-standard fair deck in your pocket, or we could’ve settled this like men.”

Bad move.

Without comment, Harvey reaches inside his suit jacket and extracts the deck still in his pocket from today’s show– a show composed entirely of Harvey Specter’s cutting-edge close-up magic, with a focus on card tricks. He thrusts it out, daring the bartender to take it.

He does.

And though Harvey can read nervousness in the way he blinks– he’ll blow every modern mentalist out of the water, if he ever decides to monetize his people-reading skills– the bartender starts in on the act all over again. There’s more layers now, he knows better than to show the exact same trick twice, and so he shuffles it a couple extra times. Then, he makes the fatal mistake of offering the deck to Harvey.

“Wanna shuffle it?” he teases with a smile, clearly joking. “To be sure?”

His smile falters as Harvey takes him up on the offer. He gapes in apparent horror as Harvey riffles the deck seven times, scrambling it to true mathematical randomness.

“Oh,” he stutters when Harvey politely offers the cards back to him. “Perfect. Thank you. Might as well…”

Shaking his head with a little huff, he shuffles the deck a few more times, and against his will Harvey chuckles, almost amused by this trainwreck of a trick.

“Uh…” He fans out the cards face-down and stares at them for a while before picking one out from the middle, seemingly at random. Wincing, he passes it to Harvey, who turns it over with a pitying smirk and–

“That’s my card.”

Harvey scowls, eyes flickering back and forth between the bartender and the King of Hearts impossibly in his hand.

The bartender’s expression turns impossibly smug.

“You hid my card,” Harvey deduces, “sometime, somewhere. It wasn’t around for the shuffling.”

“That would’ve worked,” he agrees pleasantly. “But I didn’t need to.”

He flips the cards over, revealing 51 cards in perfect unshuffled order, each suit arranged from ace to king.

Slowly Harvey’s gaze shifts up once more, his eyes dark and intense.

“You know who I am,” he intones. “What I do for a living.”

“Harvey Specter, this era’s King of Cards.” He rattles off the title bestowed by a _New York Times_ article, his eyes not leaving Harvey’s. Then he leans forward with a devious little smile, reaches into Harvey’s inner pocket, and pulls out a business card. He presses it into Harvey’s hand. “Now you know who I am too.”

_Mike Ross, Magician/Cardist._

“And _you_ need a new assistant.”

Harvey immediately shuts that down. “You’re not going to be my assistant.”

For the first time all night, real anguish crosses Mike’s face, but he rallies a second later.

“I can pull off the heels. Some nice Louboutins, a little black dress . . .”

Harvey whips out his phone, snapping a picture of the business card. “You’re not assistant material.”

He taps a few keys and then flips the phone around. When Mike reads the drafted text, _he’s_ dumbstruck for a change. Harvey gloats at gaining the upper hand.

“You’re writing to Jessica Pearson,” Mike stammers. _“The_ Jessica Pearson.”

Jessica didn’t teach Harvey everything he knows about magic, but she is responsible for a solid 30%. She’s the best damn mentor in the business, her classes are the Harvard of magic, and it warms Harvey through to hear Mike paying her the proper respect.

He presses send.

“You’ll hear about an audition in a couple days,” he says with a shrug. “Pass that, and you’ll have your own gigs within the month.”

“Thank god, because I’ve been banned from every casino in a hundred-mile radius.”

Harvey snorts.

“How does the trick work?” he asks a moment later.

There could be some simple ruse to explain it all, a second deck hidden up his sleeve, but Harvey knows every ruse in the book and has invented more than a few. He didn’t spot any trace of fraud. It’s more likely that Mike used pure skill, skill and a finely-tuned memory that could outpace anyone in the industry–

“I just have clever hands.”

Mike’s voice dips suggestively, and Harvey’s mind goes blank.

“I can’t pull any more strings with Jessica,” he replies. “You’ll have to impress her on your own merits.”

“Is that supposed to scare me?”

“It’s supposed to set up the next magic trick,” Harvey corrects with a growing smirk. “It’s your own free choice, no equivocation.”

Mike shifts forward, folding his arms on the counter, impossibly close to Harvey. “I’m listening.”

“If you reach into your apron pocket, you’ll find a room key.” He waits for Mike to check, waits for his look of delight at finding the card. “And if you want, when this place closes you can disappear . . . and reappear in room 2005.”

Mike makes him wait, pondering it, drawing out the suspense with an expert showman's finesse. At last he grants Harvey a tiny nod. Then he saunters off to customers calling from the other end of the bar, swinging his hips just so, and Harvey believes in magic again.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for TooSel! For more info, here's my [tumblr](https://frivoloussuits.tumblr.com/).
> 
> The song lyrics are from Olivia Newton-John's "Magic."


End file.
